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WordPress updated to 3.3.1 (from 3.0.6)

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012 at 2:17 am

Just sayin.

Also, worldofwarren is now a valid WordPress theme. It lacks both documentation, and…well…lots of stuff. Also, I might have broken stuff…so toss me a note/comment if you see something broken. :D I started deving at midnight…..not a good time to start after some beers and on a weekday.

This is the first of any sort of non-work related deving I’ve done all month. I hope to continue this trend…and give Tiny Tower a BIT of a break. I still want/need to crush everyone first. MWHAHAHAHAHAH

Posted in All Posts, Site Updates, worldofwarren.com | No Comments »

Site updates – Migration of professional items to warrenshea.com

Monday, January 30th, 2012 at 11:53 am

Some minor site updates.

I removed the Portfolio from my navigation
And linked Resume to warrenshea.com (still not up yet).

I’ve migrated everything from my worldofwarren.com Portfolio section to my warrenshea.com Portfolio section so there’s not much point in keeping it…I just can’t wait to finish.

warrenshea.com is almost complete. I have about 30 items to put in and I’ve put in like, 23ish….but I still have to go through my [Redacted] work and scour what I can put in, so the list might increase.

Once that’s done, some more writing, and i’m DONE.

I’m really struggling with my professional voice on this website…I want to feel professional, but also fun and playful…like IRL.

Anyways, productive weekend (tho not as productive as I would have liked). I hope the rest of the week is productive

Posted in All Posts, Site Updates, warrenshea.com, worldofwarren.com | 4 Comments »

Site Updates – Facebook Status and Recent Comments in the Right Col. –>

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 at 12:00 am

Wow, when was the last time I did any type of site update?

Anyways, I did some worldofwarren.com maintenance today, first time in a while.

What I did was add 1 Facebook Status to the right column, underneath the 3 Twitter Tweets.
Below that, I added the 3 most recent Comments, underneath the Facebook Statuses.

I didn’t want to display the comments too prominently on my site as it’s not my content, so I make you simply click “See most recent” to see them. I notice that sometimes I get really good or interesting comments on really old posts. It’s very likely no one would read those though…(other than me) and I find that unfortunate. I’d like those voices to be heard/read.

I really hope this doesn’t discourage people from commenting. Comment on this post if you think it’s a bad idea…and it will ironically do what you don’t want it to do! So….basically, I’m saying there’s nothing in it for you.

<Technical Tutorial>
Getting the Facebook Status to work was pretty difficult. There’s a Facebook RSS feed but you can’t just pull from it. But that’s the same as any RSS feed. You have to create a proxy to bypass the cross domain issues. It’s super simple:

proxy.php

<?php header(“Expires:Mon, 31 Dec 2010 05:00:00 GMT”); ?>
<?php
if ($_GET[“type”] = “xml”) {
header(“Content-type: text/xml”);
$page_contents = file_get_contents($_GET[“url”]);
}
echo $page_contents;
?>

and I just call any XML/RSS via URLs like this:

proxy.php?type=xml&url=http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:warrenshea
proxy.php?type=xml&url=http://www.worldofwarren.com/?feed=comments-rss2

Unfortunately, for some reason, Facebook doesn’t allow this. They have this whole Developer API you have to work with to get the Facebook Statuses. Why? I think that imo, having Facebook Statuses come up as simple RSS feeds for people defeat the purpose of Facebook, as well as they lose money on advertising if you can pull the Facebook Statuses from other sites.

So I had to do something else for Facebook Status. I’m not going to write a tutorial since I didn’t make it. I will say that I got it HERE:
PHP Show Your Facebook Status on your blog/website
</Technical>

Posted in All Posts, Development, PHP, Site Updates, Tutorials, Web Development, worldofwarren.com | No Comments »

…in two years…

Saturday, January 7th, 2012 at 7:15 pm

To recap…today is a special day for me. It’s the 2 year anniversary since I quit World of Warcraft. I know, it seems stupid in retrospect or hindsight that I would celebrate something like this. But World of Warcraft was an addiction of mine…and life’s been great since kicking the habit. I wrote another post last year on this day about the one year after I quit WoW. This is a followup post to that….tradition, if you will.

What did I ask myself at the end of …one year ago…

How much will change by Jan 7, 2012?
What will I accomplish?
How will my life have changed?
What will I have figured out?

What I’ve done in the last year

worldofwarren.com (previously warrenshea.com)

  • New Google+ Theme on worldofwarren.com
  • Got worldofwarren.com domain and moved content from warrenshea.com to worldofwarren.com
  • Heavily cleaned up code on worldofwarren.com
  • Fixed old themes on worldofwarren.com

I was able to separate my site into 2, a personal and professional site. Just what I wanted to do this year :) Not that it was hard…and this…

warrenshea.com

  • Almost done

….yeah, this is almost done. :D

Blogging
187 posts between Jan 7, 2010 and Jan 7, 2011. On average, roughly 15.58 posts/month. The number actually falls almost too perfectly inline with my hope of 150-200 posts this year (that I wrote I wanted in my …in one year… post). FYI – Last year’s stats were: 300 posts since my first one, on Jan 26, 2010. On average, roughly 25.25 posts/month.

Twitter
2831 tweets since Jan 18, 2010. 1345 since Jan 7, 2010. Just shy of what I did last year (1486). As expected.

Improved development skills
I definitely did NOT improve my ASP.NET C# skills and only improved my PHP by a little bit.
I had a good amount of improvement on HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery while building warrenshea.com
I’ve also learned quite a bit about Web Accessibility knowledge due to a large project at work.

Reading

  • Dragon Ball Z Vol 1 – 26 [Manga]
  • Bakuman Vol 1 – 2 [Manga]
  • Hikaru no Go – The Neverending Road – Chapter 1-79 [Fanfiction]
  • Azumanga Daioh [Manga]
  • Street Fighter: The Ultimate Edition Book 2 [Comic]
  • Street Fighter: The Ultimate Edition Book 1 [Comic]
  • Get Backers [Manga]
  • L, Change the World [Short Novel]

This is obviously not a complete list of all the things I’ve read as I’ve got so many comics and random mangas in the list too. This is just from my accomplishments post.

I haven’t read that much this year…and that’s okay. Steve Jobs book this year…and we’ll see what else.

Gaming

  • Super Mario Kart 7 [3DS]
  • Kirby: Return to Dreamland [Wii]
  • Kirby Mass Attack [DS]
  • New Super Mario Bros [DS]
  • Super Mario 3D Land [3DS]
  • Star Fox 64 [3DS]
  • Catherine [PS3]
  • Zelda: Ocarina of Time [3DS]
  • Zelda: Ocarina of Time [N64]
  • Super Mario Bros. [Wii]
  • Hard Corps: Uprising [PS3]

Last year was pretty quiet but this year was…not. More on that here

Art
Is it still okay to say this is a hobby of mine? I don’t think I did a single art piece this year.

What I hope to accomplish this year

worldofwarren.com
I’m going to get rid of the Blogger theme I have. I guess that one’s never really been mine anyways….not that the GMAIL or Google+ themes are really mine either though >_< I want to make a professional theme still...I guess that would be next on my design plate. warrenshea.com
I’m going to finish this..and soon!

[sideproject].com
I still plan on making this. It’s not my epic project. It’s a blog that won’t be updated too often. It’s based on a product line of toys I really like. Anyways, I’ll get this made this year, for sure! Right after warrenshea.com! I’m kinda waiting on my new camera for this because I want to take photos of my toys FOR this site.

Blogging
I’m getting a bit tired of blogging to be honest. I think blogging once every 4 or 5 days is a good amount…maybe a bit too little though? That would only be like, 7 posts a month! I really like having 10-15 posts a month…anyways, we’ll see.

Reading, Gaming, Art
I don’t care so much about reading or art. As for gaming, I would still like to continue gaming…but maybe game less than this last year.

Improving development skills
I’m not going to set any really high ambitions for this this year. I learn best and most when I have a practical project to work on….so I guess I’ll really try to focus learning through working on my current site and projects, worldofwarren.com, warrenshea.com, [sideproject].com, and [epicsite?].com.

I guess what I learn will all depend on the projects I do. I’m try to focus less on learning, and more on working on practical work…and let the learning come naturally and automatically.

How I’ve changed professionally this last year

To be honest: At this point, I think I’m at my lowest point of motivation ever. Part of it happens to be my work friends. It seems like the new friends I’ve made at work really affect my productivity. Not surprising. All I want to do nowadays is chat. It’s been really bad (professionally). Personally it’s been really fun and great lol.

Part of it is being on these super really long projects. They’ve been delayed and delayed. I’m afraid to take on new projects that will end up going and then falling at the same time as these big projects, and physically and mentally stressing me like they did earlier this year. I hated it. All work, no play. And then I got sick. I don’t wanna go through that again. To be honest, I’ve been avoiding projects for what seems like a long time. I guess it’s only been since Sept/Oct though.

How I hope to change professionally this year

I need to get out of my rut. Should I volunteer for more work projects? Maybe new job might help. But I dunno. I guess I’ve been in this job/role for about 4 years. Maybe it’s time for a change? I just need some motivation…

…in two years…

I’ve done a lot since I quit WoW, two years ago today. I like where this is all going. I like the websites I’ve done. I like the friends I’ve gotten in touch with again and the new friends I’ve made this year. I like that I’ve watched a lot of new shows, listened to different music, played lots of games. Basically, I’m really happy with all the things I’ve done since I quit WoW. I can’t imagine doing 1/2 of these things had I still been playing.

Let’s see what this next year brings :)
BRING. IT.

Posted in All Posts, Blogging, Daily Randomness, Games, Introspection, My Life, Past, warrenshea.com, Web Developer, Work, World of Warcraft, worldofwarren.com, Writing | No Comments »

One SQL Statement to Destory the World (of Warren)

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 at 4:34 pm

^ That’s supposed to be a play on “One Ring to Rule the World”….which is my butchered version of
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
from LOTR.

Anyways.

So I brought my site down today. Well, technically I only brought the blog portion down, but that’s 99% of my site.

This is how it happened.

When I did my migration a month ago, for some reason apostrophes were replaced with an obscure character encoding, probably due to the Database not being the correct coding (ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8 or vice versa).

I was trying to do a SQL statement on the wp_posts table to replace all instances of
’ to ‘

This was the SQL command I ran:

UPDATE wp_posts
SET post_title = REPLACE(post_title, “’”, “‘”)
WHERE (post_title LIKE ‘%â%’)

To translate: If there’s an instance of â in the title of the post, find ’ and replace it with ‘

Simple. Anyways, I ran the code and it worked like a charm on all the titles. I next had to replace the content of the post. Easy right?

The SQL command should have been

UPDATE wp_posts
SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, “’”, “‘”)
WHERE (post_content LIKE ‘%â%’)

But instead, I wrote

UPDATE wp_posts
SET post_content = REPLACE(post_title, “’”, “‘”)
WHERE (post_content LIKE ‘%â%’)

To translate (minus insignificant details): If there’s an instance of â in the content of the post, replace the content of the post with the title of the post.

As a result, all my old posts’ content was replaced with the title of the post. OMG >_< I created a ticket with my hosting provider and they happened to have a backup of the database from yesterday morning (so I was only missing 3 comments from then, of which I obtained through Google Reader/Feedburner + FireBug). I got it restored within an hour or so…. But I still have to fix that apostrophe problem still….but this time, I’m kinda really afraid to do so :'(

Posted in All Posts, Development, My Life, Web Development, worldofwarren.com | 1 Comment »

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